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Digital marketing is a versatile marketing method compatible with any type of business and industry. It provides qualified leads that bring higher revenue and more sales, improving the business’ growth trajectory. Having said this, one of the considerations every type of company often takes is whether to hire an in-house marketing team or work with a marketing agency located elsewhere.
In this guide, we will explore this topic in detail and help you decide whether a marketing agency is suitable for your business or an in-house team. Let’s begin…
For a Quick Review | Pros, Cons, and Cost
| In-House Team | Marketing Agency | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost: Upwards of $250,000 per year | Cost: Between $20,000 to $200,000 per year. | ||
| Pros | Cons | Pros | Cons |
| An in-house team will be explicitly familiar with the brand. | Recruiting the right talent for an in-house team is going to be a monumental task that will be taxing in terms of money and time. |
A marketing agency will have extensive experience with digital marketing, and they will also have a portfolio to show for it. | With some marketing agencies, the lack of communication can become an issue, especially when the marketing agency is located in a different time zone. |
| An in-house team has the best kind of accessibility when it comes to making changes, running the campaigns, holding meetings, etc. | The weekly or monthly cost of hiring and retaining employees can become a burden after some time, especially when results are a bit slow. | They will use their tools and software, which saves you the cost of buying them from your side. | A good marketing agency works for multiple clients from different industries. This can become an issue in terms of understanding your brand’s unique voice and, more specifically, remembering it. |
| They are a focused bunch of people whose only task is to create strategies to improve your business’ outreach and profits. | With an in-house team, you will also have to bear the one-time and subscription software costs required to create, run, and monitor the campaigns. | A marketing agency can cater to any level of scalability in the campaign as they have the capability to bring more people to the team without affecting your budget. | Like in an in-house team, you cannot control the workings, schedule, and collaboration system of a marketing agency. |
| You will have the best control when working with an in-house team in terms of how they operate, interact, and collaborate. | When it comes to scaling the campaigns, an in-house team may not be as efficient with the same because they have limited hands to work with. | In a marketing agency, you will find people with multiple specializations working together. This helps your campaign as you will get all the services under one roof. | |
The table above highlights the major areas of consideration and shares the key points you will need to make a quick decision.
Now on to a detailed overview and explanation of the aspects you need to better understand the distinction between a marketing agency and an in-house team.
Understanding In-House Marketing Team
An in-house team means you will hire people with the requisite skills and talent to work on your projects and marketing campaigns. Now because this is an in-house team, you will have to arrange for a workspace, infrastructure, and IT support to help them work efficiently. And this raises the question, are you ready or should you invest in all these things.
Let’s find out.
Advantages of Getting an In-House team
1. Familiarity with the brand: An in-house team works to know your brand closely and resonate with its values and voice. This helps them build the right precedence for creating marketing campaigns and gather the best materials.
2. Easy to Access: An in-house team is easily accessible. Since they are working under the same roof as you, communication is quick. Plus, everyone in the team can also collaborate and get fast responses. This certainly helps with completing the mission-critical tasks on time.
3. Focussed and Easy to Control: With an in-house team will get people who are entirely focused on helping you build the marketing campaigns. Because they are working under one roof as you, it will also be easy to control their actions and make changes along the way.
Disadvantages of Getting an In-House Team
1. Finding the Right Talent: To build the right team and nurture them to a stage where your marketing process is almost automated, you will need time and resources. It can take about 50 days to fill one position in this department.
Not only in terms of time, but you will also need to spend some money on attracting and hiring new employees. Hence, it’s a big investment to build the right team.
Are you ready for this kind of time and money investment?
2. Salaries and Benefits to Employees: A four to five-member marketing team can cost more than $250,000 per year. Yes, you can hire employees who will take a lesser salary, but you might have to put in more work yourself to train the new employees. Besides the salary, additional costs can add up for providing benefits to the employees. Things like paid leaves, overtime, holiday leaves, etc., have a direct and indirect impact on your expenses.
3. Cost of Software and Tools: For creating effective marketing campaigns, marketers need to use tools and solutions built for this purpose. We have tools like Ahrefs and SemRush for keyword research and campaign monitoring. Then there are creative tools like Canva etc., required to design graphics.
4. Issues with Scalability: It’s a good thing that you are looking to expand your marketing efforts. But it will take time and money to add more talent and skill to the team. And this is the issue with in-house marketing teams. The limited number of team members also limits your capabilities to bring on additional marketing systems.
This sums up the discussion on working with an in-house marketing team. Now let’s move on to a detailed discussion on an agency and how it can compensate for the defaults experienced with the in-house marketing team.
Knowing More about a Marketing Agency
An agency means a dedicated marketing company whose primary purpose is to get more business and customers for its clients. Marketing agencies may be located in a different city, country, or time zone, and you communicate with them via professional communication tools like Skype, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.
Is a marketing agency better than an in-house team? How does a marketing agency compare with an in-house team? Let’s find out.
Advantages of Working with a Marketing Agency
1. Specialized Expertise: Marketing agencies have experts on their team who work together with other team members to create the requisite campaigns. Since you will be working with experienced teams and professionals, results are much easier to come, and you will experience a better return on investment.
2. Capabilities: The capabilities of a dedicated marketing team are way better. They are familiar and experienced with a wide range of marketing concepts and strategies gained from years of experience and research. Having more capabilities means as a business, you can explore different strategies within a budget limit and reap the benefits of new marketing strategies.
3. Agency Has its own Tools: You will save money by hiring a marketing agency because they already have the tools and software required to build and run the campaigns. And this does not stop here. A marketing agency can also provide marketing services that go beyond standard marketing and use artificial intelligence-enabled tools for better insights and outcomes.
4. Easy to Scale: Since a marketing agency has all the resources, the team, and the bandwidth to work more, they can easily cater to an increase in the work scope. Come the busy holiday season; you will need the requisite marketing campaigns to increase your outreach and take the biggest share of the pie.
A marketing agency can fulfill the additional marketing requirements with ease. The same applies to when you want to pause your marketing campaigns. In an in-house team setting, pausing the campaigns means you either have to fire the employees or pay them for doing practically nothing.
Disadvantages of Hiring a Marketing Agency
1. Location Issues: Mostly, marketing teams are located in a different time zone than yours. So, communicating with people across the world can slow down your progress. Not that you cannot communicate with them, but there are time zone issues that can cause a disconnect.
When either side wants to ask something, they might have to wait for up to 1 to 5 hours to get a reply. Also, it is difficult to align each other’s schedules. That’s why it is advised to work with an agency that has a system in place to streamline communication and ensure quick response.
2. Working for Multiple Clients: Marketing agencies do not have a single client. They have onboarded several clients from different industries. This means that at some point, there is a chance of a mix up between yours and another client’s campaign.
Even worse, they might choose to prefer working on another high-paying client before working on your campaign.
3. Less Control: Due to the time and distance gap, you have very little control over how the marketing agency you have hired works. The agency will have its own system for making and running the campaigns.
If you are in the habit of controlling every aspect of your organization and how it operates, working with a marketing agency might prove to be a challenge.
This was all about the pros and cons of a marketing agency and an in-house team. Now you have enough information to make a choice. The way we have experienced things is that startups and small businesses prefer not to hire an in-house team because of the salaries and the overhead costs involved.
On the other hand, bigger companies might consider having an in-house team because they have the resources. But the thing with an in-house team is that the buck doesn’t stop there.
Once things start to pick up speed, you will have the required talent from time to time, making the cost curve rise upwards. So, it’s a tough decision, but one you have to make because you cannot and should not ignore digital marketing and the benefits it will bring.
Is it Important to Invest in Digital Marketing?
Yes, it is. With the majority of the population having access to the internet and smart devices, the internet has become a place to shop, earn, entertain, talk, learn, and so much more. So if you want to get more customers, you need to build a strategy to shine in the web world, and digital marketing is the way to go about it.
Digital marketing comprises different marketing strategies or techniques executed with a dedicated purpose. These include;
1. SEO: Search Engine Optimization is meant to help you improve your website’s performance so that it comes on top of the search engine results page. The motive is to bring your website on the first page of search results.
2. PPC: Pay Per Click advertising involves running ads against relevant keywords. With every ad click, you are charged some amount. The key is to find the right keywords that have the lowest price but the highest relevance.
3. Email Marketing: Email marketing has the highest ROI, but it also takes time to bring results. The strategy is to send emails to the prospects in the hope of getting them to take the desired action.
4. Social Media Marketing: Another important marketing technique, social media, is about creating posts pertinent to the business and its target audience only to share on social media handles.
Conclusion
When you are given a choice to pick a marketing agency or an in-house team to run your marketing campaigns, choose according to your requirements, budget, and objectives. Both types of marketing teams can deliver results, but the key is to identify which team will provide the best results at the lowest costs.
A marketing agency costs less and has several experts working together under one roof, but it is not easy to establish control and communicate with them. Communicating with an in-house team is easy, and you can set up everything according to your requirements, but you might have to incur a higher cost and spend more time than usual in marketing.
If you are choosing a marketing agency, Head45 is here to help you with digital marketing needs. We have experts working under one roof with years of experience and a knack for delivering the best results for our clients. Contact us today.
